EXCLUSIVE: The K-drama craze continues around the world, with Rakuten Viki snapping up a soon-to-launch drama starring Song Joong-ki (Reborn Rich) and Chun Woo-hee (The Wailing) for multiple territories.
The Asian entertainment-focused streaming has acquired rights to My Youth in the U.S., Latin America and Europe. It will launch on streaming service Viki in September.
Directed by Lee Sang-yeop (Yumi’s Cells) and written by Park Si-hyeon, the series follows Sun Woo-hae (Song) and his first love, Sung Je-yeon (Chun), who reconnect after a decade apart. Sun has found comfort and satisfaction in his work as a novelist and florist after a difficult childhood in the entertainment industry, while Sung is driven to reach the highest echelons of career success as a team leader at Feel Entertainment, having seen her wealthy family lose everything. Their reunion forces them to confront the past and their present selves.
“My Youth features incredible storytelling, as well as wonderful talent both behind and in front of the camera,” said Jaehee Hong, SVP of Content at Rakuten Viki. “The series makes an excellent addition to our line-up of rich K-content meant to appeal both to fans of k-drama as well as anyone looking to immerse themselves in a riveting drama.”
SLL and High-Zium Studio made the series, which is due to launch on JTBC in Korea on September 5.
For Rakuten Viki, the deal comes after it announced My Girlfriend is The Man!, a co-production with Studio N, in May. Other recent deals have included the acquisition of Toronto-premiered coming-of-age film Love in the Big City and the release of Yumi’s Cells: The Movie in July 2024 and an agreement with China’s Bilibili for a pair of animated series.
Rakuten Viki, part of e-commerce giant Rakuten Group, has over 100 million registered users in 190+ countries, and sits alongside k-entertainment news site Soompi.
In an interview with Deadline last year, Rakuten Viki revealed around than 75% of the streamer’s viewers were of non-Asian descent, and that k-content such as True Beauty, What’s Wrong With Secretary Kim, My Lovely Liar and Perfect Marriage Revenge were among its biggest hits. Other top-performing shows included Chinese titles Love Like the Galaxy and Only For Love, and Thailand’s F4 Thailand: Boys Over Flowers and Japan’s An Incurable Case of Love.
Auxy Studio is one of our favourite music-making apps for iOS. Launched in 2014, it offered users a simple, uncluttered interface that made sequencing its onboard sounds quick and intuitive, and it’s since been updated with a host of useful features including MIDI support and DAW export.
The app has now officially launched a desktop version that brings Auxy to macOS for the first time. Available now in the App Store, Auxy Max offers all the same sounds and features as the iOS version. A free version is available with a limit of four instruments per project, but more can be had if you upgrade to the paid-for tier at $59.99.
In other Auxy news, the company has teased the release of its debut hardware product. While we’re not entirely sure what form this will take, Auxy has shared an image that gives us a glimpse of an off-white corner, complete with a wooden end-cheek and the company logo. (It looks likely to be a keyboard equipped with Auxy’s sound library.)
(Image credit: Auxy)
“Alongside improving our apps and adding more sounds, we’ve been working on something different: a hardware product that we plan to launch later this fall,” reads a statement from Auxy. “Our goal is to build a playable instrument, based on the same philosophy as our apps: beautiful, simple, and made to inspire creativity. We’re excited to share more soon. Stay tuned!”
Auxy Max is available now, but you’ll have to wait a few more months to get your hands on the company’s mysterious hardware instrument. In the meantime, here’s a video of Japanese artist Voboku performing a head-banging live set with nothing more than an iPhone and a copy of Auxy.
Auxy Max is compatible with macOS 13.5 or later. Download Auxy Max from the App Store.
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An artistic rendering of an evening approximately 252 million years ago during the late Permian in the Luangwa Basin of Zambia. The scene includes several saber-toothed gorgonopsians and beaked dicynodonts.Gabriel Ugueto
An international team of paleontologists has spent more than 15 years excavating and studying fossils from Africa to expand our understanding of the Permian, a period of Earth’s history that began 299 million years ago and ended 252 million years ago with our planet’s largest and most devastating mass extinction. Led by researchers at the University of Washington and the Field Museum of Natural History, the team is identifying the animals that thrived in southern Pangea — the planet’s single supercontinent at the time — just before the so-called “Great Dying” wiped out about 70% of terrestrial species, and an even larger fraction of marine ones.
“This mass extinction was nothing short of a cataclysm for life on Earth, and changed the course of evolution,” said Christian Sidor, a UW professor of biology and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the UW Burke Museum of Natural History & Culture. “But we lack a comprehensive view of which species survived, which didn’t, and why. The fossils we have collected in Tanzania and Zambia will give us a more global perspective on this unprecedented period in our planet’s natural history.”
Sidor and Kenneth Angielczyk, curator of paleomammalogy at the Field Museum, are co-editors of a 14-article series published Aug. 7 in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology featuring the team’s recent discoveries about the myriad of animals that made Permian Africa their home. These include saber-toothed predators, burrowing foragers and a large, salamander-like creature.
All these finds were excavated in three basins across southern Africa: the Ruhuhu Basin in southern Tanzania, the Luangwa Basin in eastern Zambia and the Mid-Zambezi Basin in southern Zambia. Most were discovered by team members on multiple, month-long excavation trips to the region over the past 17 years. Others were analyses of specimens dug up decades prior that had been stored in museum collections.
“These parts of Zambia and Tanzania contain absolutely beautiful fossils from the Permian,” said Sidor. “They are giving us an unprecedented view of life on land leading up to the mass extinction.”
Jacqueline Lungmus, an assistant professor of geosciences at the University of Oklahoma and UW undergraduate alum; Kenneth Angielczyk, curator of paleomammology at the Field Museum; and Brandon Peecook, associate professor of biological sciences at Idaho State University and a UW doctoral alum, excavate a fossilized dicynodont from the Permian of Zambia.Roger Smith/University of the Witwatersrand
Starting in 2007, Sidor and his team, including UW students and postdoctoral researchers, made five trips to the Ruhuhu Basin and four to the Mid-Zambezi and Luangwa basins, all in cooperation with the Tanzanian and Zambian governments. The researchers trekked between field sites miles apart to collect fossils. They stayed in villages or camped in the open — once waking during the night to the ground-quaking stomps of a nearby elephant herd. All fossils collected by the team will be returned to Tanzania and Zambia after researchers have completed their analyses.
The Permian is the endpoint of what paleontologists call the Paleozoic Era. During this time, animal life — which evolved first in Earth’s oceans — began to colonize land and complex terrestrial ecosystems developed. By the Permian, a diverse array of amphibian and reptile-like creatures roamed environments ranging from early forests to arid valleys. The end-Permian mass extinction — whose precise cause scientists are still debating — obliterated many of these ecosystems and ushered in the Mesozoic Era, which saw the evolution of dinosaurs, as well as the first birds, flowering plants and mammals.
For decades, scientists’ best understanding of the Permian, the Great Dying and the start of the Mesozoic came from the Karoo Basin in South Africa, which contains a near-complete fossil record of periods before and after the mass extinction. But beginning in the 1930s, paleontologists realized that basins in Tanzania and Zambia contain fossil records of this time range that are almost as pristine as the Karoo’s. The excavation trips by Sidor, Angielczyk and their colleagues represent the largest analysis to date of the region’s fossil record from before and after the Great Dying. In 2018, they published a comprehensive analysis of the post-Permian animals of the Ruhuhu and Luangwa basins. These new papers look further back into the Permian.
A map of Zambia and Tanzania in southern Africa showing the locations of the three basins visited by the team, the Luangwa and Mid-Zambezi basins in Zambia and the Ruhuhu Basin in Tanzania.Christian Sidor/University of Washington
“The number of specimens we’ve found in Zambia and Tanzania is so high and their condition is so exquisite that we can make species-level comparisons to what paleontologists have found in South Africa,” said Sidor. “I know of no better place on Earth for getting sufficient detail of this time period to make such detailed conclusions and comparisons.”
The team’s papers describe a number of new species of dicynodonts. These small, burrowing, reptile-like herbivores first evolved in the mid-Permian. By the time of the mass extinction, dicynodonts — many of whom sported a beak-like snout with two small tusks that likely aided burrowing — were the dominant plant-eaters on land. The team’s findings also include several new species of large, saber-toothed predators called gorgonopsians, as well as a new species of temnospondyl, a large salamander-like amphibian.
“We can now compare two different geographic regions of Pangea and see what was going on both before and after the end-Permian mass extinction,” said Sidor. “We can really start to ask questions about who survived and who didn’t.”
In addition to the UW and the Field Museum, the team includes scientists from the University of Chicago, Loyola University Chicago, Idaho State University, the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, Carleton University, the University of Southern California, the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, the Iziko South African Museum, Southern Methodist University, the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, the Museum for Natural History in Berlin, the U.S. Geological Survey, the University of Oklahoma, the National Heritage Conservation Commission in Lusaka, Virginia Tech, and the Chipembele Wildlife Education Center in Mfume, Zambia. Seven of these scientists are former UW postdoctoral researchers, doctoral students or undergraduate students. The research was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society.
For more information, contact Sidor at casidor@uw.edu.
Tag(s): Burke Museum of Natural History & Culture • College of Arts & Sciences • Department of Biology
Apple’s tvOS 26 beta removing HomeKit branding and adding “Apple Home” shouldn’t be a surprise, since Apple has been on that road for two years.
HomeKit is now over ten years old, having been announced during the launch of iOS 8 in 2014. In that time, it’s rather failed to make the impact Apple may have hoped for, and alongside some fundamental technology changes, the company is also quite slowly rebranding it.
The latest example of this has been spotted by Israeli publication, The Verifier. It shows how tvOS 26 has now reworded its Settings menus from “AirPlay & HomeKit,” to “AirPlay & Apple Home.”
It follows Apple’s move in iOS 18.4 to force users to upgrade to the new HomeKit architecture. That came in 2025, but the first release of the updated version of HomeKit, was as far back as November 2022.
Since then, there have been various references in the code for operating systems such as iOS 26. One notable one even gave a hint to the screen size of a predicted Apple Home Hub, now expected in 2026.
Craig Federighi launching the original HomeKit in 2014 — image credit: Apple
Separately, this Home Hub is rumored to be being tested by Apple staff, and it was even a surprise that the expected “homeOS” was not unveiled at WWDC 2025.
Yet Apple has been steadily working to put everything in place for this new smart home project. It has the benefit now of supporting Matter, the open smart home standard that has also been adopted by Samsung, Google, and more.
So now instead of being confined to working only with smart devices explicitly made to work with HomeKit, Apple users should be able to buy and use devices from any manufacturer. Apple’s HomeKit was never going to supplant its rivals, but now any device can come under the control of Apple Home.
This new report of the Apple Home branding is an early occurrence of it appearing in software that users will be able to see, once the beta test is over. But it’s far from the first sign of the branding at all.
Back in January 2025, for instance, Apple announced that it was making it easier for third-party firms to gain what was once called “Works with HomeKit.” And is now “Works with Apple Home.”
AppleInsider has also been told of cases where Apple has actually chastized brands who referred to HomeKit instead of Apple Home.
Note that overall, The Verifier does not have good track record in Apple reports. However, this claim is backed up by screen shots showing the new wording, and is getting picked up by more conventional media as a sea change to branding, where it is not.
PLANS are taking shape for CCUS hubs across Asia, as heavy industry firms join forces in a study that could see captured carbon shipped to Australia for burial.
BHP, Chevron and Hyundai are among the steelmakers, mining firms and energy companies that have agreed to work on what they say is the first independent, industry-led study in Asia to examine how technically and commercially feasible it is to develop large-scale CCUS projects to reuse or store CO2.
The pre-feasibility study will look at which industrial processes will suit CCUS if companies share infrastructure and capture CO2 at scale, before then piping or shipping it for storage at sites in Asia or northern Australia.
The consortium says that building regional hubs should optimise the costs of CCUS, share the business risk and lead to innovative ways of capturing carbon from multiple hard-to-abate industries in a single sweep.
Ben Ellis, vice-president of marketing sustainability, at BHP said: “With more than 1bn t of [steel] production a year in Asia coming from blast furnace capacity that is relatively early in its production life, it’s important for industry to progress technologies to decarbonise existing steelmaking assets while new commercial pathways to decarbonise steelmaking are developed over time.”
In 2023, Australia amended legislation to allow the import and export of captured CO2. The consultancy Wood Mackenzie estimates that it could create a A$600bn (US$390bn) industry by opening up its geological storage sites to customers across the Asia-Pacific.
ArcelorMittal Nippon Steel India, JSW Steel and Mitsui are the other partners in the consortium, which is open to more companies joining and contributing to the study. Each company is expected to have operations included in at least one hub.
The partners will create a conceptual development strategy with cost estimates for each hub and look at the regulations on the cross-border transport of CO2 needed to unlock the projects. The partners expect to complete the study by the end of 2026 and will share the findings publicly to help other industrial firms advance CCUS and bring about change in policies and regulations.
Yonghee Kim, vice-president of the process R&D sub-division at Hyundai Steel, said: “This consortium goes beyond conventional technological development – it aims to deliver real and measurable emissions reductions through collaboration with global partners, sharing knowledge and experience across borders.”
Hatch is project managing the venture in partnership with the Global CCS Institute.
Thank you for visiting the Contemporary Pediatrics® website. Take a look at some of our top stories from the week (Monday, August 4, to Friday, August 8, 2025), and click on each link to read and watch anything you may have missed.
A JAMA Network Open analysis of data from 259,623 US adolescents found that between 2005 and 2023, medical use of prescription stimulants for ADHD increased modestly, while nonmedical use declined steadily. Lifetime nonmedical use reached its lowest level in 2023, reversing earlier trends in which misuse exceeded medical use. The largest decreases were seen in twelfth graders, who initially reported the highest rates of nonmedical use.
Researchers noted that most adolescents currently prescribed stimulants had been using them long term, and the rise in medical use did not coincide with an increase in misuse. The authors suggested these findings may ease concerns about diversion but stressed the importance of ongoing monitoring as prescribing trends evolve.
Click here for more.
On August 6, 2025, MannKind Corporation submitted a supplemental Biologics License Application to the FDA for its inhaled insulin Afrezza for a pediatric population indication, with a decision expected early in the fourth quarter of 2025, according to a financial report from the company.1
The filing was based on data from the INHALE-1 study, led by Michael Haller, MD, MS-CI, lead author of the study and professor and chief of Pediatric Endocrinology at the University of Florida. The study evaluated the safety and efficacy of the inhaled insulin regimen as a replacement for rapid-acting meal insulin in children with type 1 diabetes (T1D).
“The primary outcome essentially showed non-inferiority of inhaled insulin compared to rapid-acting injected insulin,” stated Haller in the video above. “This finding is slightly qualified by the inclusion of 1 patient who was highly non-adherent to their insulin regimen and was assigned to the inhaled insulin group. Including this patient in the analysis resulted in a non-significant p-value for non-inferiority. However, in a sensitivity analysis excluding this non-adherent [patient], the inhaled and injected insulin groups showed nearly identical outcomes in terms of hemoglobin A1C.”
Click here to watch our full interview with Michael Haller, MD, MS-CI.
Asthma remains a leading cause of school absenteeism in the US, affecting roughly 3 in every 30 students, with higher rates among low-income populations. Experts note that returning to school can present challenges such as environmental triggers, medication timing issues, and limited access to rescue therapies. Younger children may rely on school staff to recognize symptoms, while older students—especially adolescents—may underreport symptoms or skip controller medications, leading to flares. Stigma, inconsistent communication, and lack of a clear asthma action plan can further complicate management.
Pediatricians play a key role in preparing families for the school year by ensuring students have inhalers, spacers, and written care plans for both home and school. Reviewing triggers, confirming medication refills, and fostering collaboration with school nurses can help maintain asthma control during the day. Practical strategies—such as pacing during physical activity, restarting allergy medications before school begins, and ensuring warm-up and cool-down periods during exercise—can reduce flare-ups. Consistent communication between parents, providers, and schools is essential to keeping children healthy and in class.
On August 6, 2025, the FDA approved tocilizumab-anoh (Avtozma; Celltrion) IV for treating cytokine release syndrome (CRS) in patients aged 2 years and older, aligning it with all indications of its reference drug, tocilizumab (Actemra; Genentech). CRS is a severe immune reaction that can cause widespread inflammation and organ damage. The biosimilar had previously received approvals in January 2025 for conditions including polyarticular and systemic juvenile idiopathic arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, giant cell arteritis, and COVID-19 in certain hospitalized adults.
Celltrion reported that phase 3 data confirmed the biosimilar’s efficacy, safety, and pharmacokinetics were highly similar to the reference product. The IV formulation is expected to be available in the US on August 31, 2025, with the subcutaneous version to follow at a later, undisclosed date.
Click here for full approval details.
On August 5, 2025, the FDA approved fremanezumab-vfrm (Ajovy; Teva Pharmaceuticals) injection for preventive treatment of episodic migraine in pediatric patients aged 6 years and older who weigh at least 45 kg (99 lb). This is the first approval of a calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) ligand for migraine prevention in children, expanding the drug’s prior adult indication. The approval was supported by phase 3 SPACE trial results showing significant reductions in monthly migraine days compared to placebo, with a safety profile consistent with adult studies. The most common side effects were injection site reactions, while serious hypersensitivity reactions were rare.
Daniel Ricciardo has explained how he is going through “a bit of self-exploration” after leaving the world of Formula 1, with the Australian “trying to figure out who I am” beyond racing.
Ricciardo dropped off the F1 grid following the 2024 Singapore Grand Prix, leaving him with a career total of 257 starts, three pole positions, eight victories, 32 podium finishes and more than 1,300 points.
Since then, Ricciardo has kept a relatively low profile, only occasionally making appearances at rounds of his own karting series and sharing few reflections on an F1 stint that featured time at HRT, Toro Rosso (later AlphaTauri/RB), Red Bull, Renault and McLaren.
Speaking in a rare post-F1 interview at Ray White’s Connect conference in his native Australia, Ricciardo shared more on what he has been doing since walking away from the sport just under a year ago – and some of the realisations that have followed.
“Well, I haven’t been shaving my face,” Ricciardo, who recently turned 36, initially joked. “The beard is my comfort right now.”
On a more serious note, he continued: “This year has been a bit of self-exploration. I lived this crazy high-speed life for so long and this year I’ve sat into a little bit of stillness.
“I’ve had a lot of time. I’ve done some hiking. I was in Alaska a few weeks ago and didn’t get mauled by a grizzly [bear], which was a bonus.
“I’ve been trying to figure out who I am other than this race car driver. I’ve come to appreciate the little thing[s] more and the meaning of the importance of family and friends.
“I’ve always been driven and that sometimes leads you to being selfish, so I’m trying to learn to be a bit more selfless and become a better listener.”
With that extra time to reflect, Ricciardo took it all the way back to his very first steps in motorsport – and admitted that he still finds it difficult to believe some of the successes he went on to experience.
“[My] childhood was great,” the Perth-born racer said. “I was always driven to do something that scared me a bit.
“The reason I got into racing was because no one was really doing it. It was my chance to do something a little bit cooler than everyone else.
“I was just showing off, but showing off has got me to a really good place in life.”
He added: “Sometimes I think about things like winning Monaco and think, ‘Did that actually happen?!’.
“I always loved racing, but I never thought I’d have the career I had and make it to F1.
“You just have to take everything one step at a time. If you look too far ahead, everything looks a bit daunting.”
Cisco, Dell Technologies, HPE, Lenovo and Supermicro Unveil High-Volume Servers Featuring NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs to Accelerate Workloads From AI to IT
SIGGRAPH—NVIDIA today announced that the NVIDIA RTX PRO™ 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPU is coming to the world’s most popular enterprise servers, speeding the shift from traditional CPU systems to accelerated computing platforms.
With these new 2U mainstream servers, enterprises worldwide can harness the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture in the most widely adopted rack-mounted systems for breakthrough performance and efficiency in their data centers.
Global system partners including Cisco, Dell Technologies, HPE, Lenovo and Supermicro will offer the 2U NVIDIA RTX PRO Servers — available in multiple configurations — to bring universal acceleration for enterprise workloads spanning agentic AI, content creation, data analytics, graphics, scientific simulation, as well as industrial and physical AI.
“AI is reinventing computing for the first time in 60 years — what started in the cloud is now transforming the architecture of on-premises data centers,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “With the world’s leading server providers, we’re making NVIDIA Blackwell RTX PRO Servers the standard platform for enterprise and industrial AI.”
NVIDIA RTX PRO Server Family Brings Accelerated Systems to Data Centers
Every year, enterprises buy millions of servers for business workloads. They can now refresh these systems with accelerated servers, as AI becomes increasingly critical to operations.
RTX PRO Servers bring GPU acceleration to traditional CPU-based workloads like data analytics, simulation, video processing and graphics rendering — delivering up to 45x better performance, which results in 18x higher energy efficiency with lower cost of ownership compared with CPU-only 2U systems.
NVIDIA RTX PRO Servers represent a new class of on-premises infrastructure that brings groundbreaking Blackwell performance to enterprise customers building AI factories with space-, power- and cooling-constrained data centers.
These systems also provide the infrastructure backbone for the NVIDIA AI Data Platform, a customizable reference design for building modern storage systems for enterprise agentic AI. At SIGGRAPH, Dell is announcing updates to the Dell AI Data Platform — integrated with the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design — along with Dell PowerEdge R7725 2U servers featuring two RTX PRO 6000 GPUs, NVIDIA AI Enterprise software and NVIDIA networking.
The new 2U mainstream systems join a family of RTX PRO Servers announced in May at COMPUTEX, providing a full spectrum of rack-mounted designs capable of supporting two, four or eight NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs. The servers are ideal for enterprises looking to optimize performance, efficiency and costs.
Breakthrough AI Performance for Enterprise Data Centers
The new RTX PRO Servers provide a versatile, high-performance platform for a broad range of applications including AI and machine learning, data analytics, 3D graphics and scientific simulation. These servers incorporate the latest Blackwell architecture innovations, including:
Fifth-generation Tensor Cores and second-generation Transformer Engine with support for FP4 precision, delivering up to 6x faster inference performance compared with the previous-generation NVIDIA L40S GPU
Fourth-generation NVIDIA RTX™ technology for photorealistic rendering and visualization to deliver up to 4x higher performance than the L40S GPU
Enterprise-grade scale for multi-user AI deployments, using virtualization and NVIDIA Multi-Instance GPU technology for four fully isolated instances per GPU
Improved performance per watt for sustainable data center operations
Accelerating Physical AI and Robotics Workloads
RTX PRO Servers running NVIDIA Omniverse™ libraries and NVIDIA Cosmos™ world foundation models enable physical AI developers to build and deploy applications including digital twins for factory and robot simulation or large-scale synthetic data generation.
RTX PRO Servers can run simulation and synthetic data generation workflows up to 4x faster than systems with L40S GPUs.
In addition, to make spaces smarter and more secure, RTX PRO Servers can now support advanced blueprints — including the latest NVIDIA Blueprint for video search and summarization, part of the NVIDIA Metropolis platform — as well as vision language models and synthetic data generation extensions to boost productivity and enhance safety across physical AI environments.
Speed and Scale for Enterprise AI and Agents
All RTX PRO Servers are certified for NVIDIA AI Enterprise — the software layer that accelerates and secures AI development and deployment.
RTX PRO Servers are ideal for running AI agents that use AI reasoning models to act and automate complex tasks. Such models include Llama Nemotron Super, also announced today, which delivers up to 3x price performance when running with NVFP4 on a single NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 GPU compared with FP8 on NVIDIA H100 GPUs. This enables more accurate reasoning at a lower cost.
The Blackwell platform builds on NVIDIA’s ecosystem of powerful development tools, NVIDIA CUDA-X™ libraries, over 6 million developers and nearly 6,000 applications to scale performance across thousands of GPUs.
Availability
Global system makers Cisco, Dell, HPE, Lenovo and Supermicro will offer a wide range of NVIDIA-Certified RTX PRO Servers. Additional data center system partners bringing RTX PRO Servers to market include Advantech, Aetina, Airves, ASRock Rack, ASUS, Compal, Foxconn, GIGABYTE, Inventec, MiTAC Computing, MSI, PEGATRON, Quanta Cloud Technology (QCT), Wistron and Wiwynn.
Customers can order RTX PRO Servers today from these system makers and channel partners worldwide. Configurations with eight RTX PRO 6000 GPUs in 4U form factors are available now. The 2U mainstream RTX PRO Servers are expected to be available later this year. Learn more about RTX PRO Servers.
Watch the NVIDIA Research special address at SIGGRAPH.
The small satellite was to map lunar water, but operators lost contact with the spacecraft the day after launch and were unable to recover the mission.
NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer ended its mission to the Moon on July 31. Despite extensive efforts, mission operators were unable to establish two-way communications after losing contact with the spacecraft the day following its Feb. 26 launch.
The mission aimed to produce high-resolution maps of water on the Moon’s surface and determine what form the water is in, how much is there, and how it changes over time. The maps would have supported future robotic and human exploration of the Moon as well as commercial interests while also contributing to the understanding of water cycles on airless bodies throughout the solar system.
Lunar Trailblazer shared a ride on the second Intuitive Machines robotic lunar lander mission, IM-2, which lifted off at 7:16 p.m. EST on Feb. 26 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The small satellite separated as planned from the rocket about 48 minutes after launch to begin its flight to the Moon. Mission operators at Caltech’s IPAC in Pasadena established communications with the small spacecraft at 8:13 p.m. EST. Contact was lost the next day.
Without two-way communications, the team was unable to fully diagnose the spacecraft or perform the thruster operations needed to keep Lunar Trailblazer on its flight path.
“At NASA, we undertake high-risk, high-reward missions like Lunar Trailblazer to find revolutionary ways of doing new science,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “While it was not the outcome we had hoped for, mission experiences like Lunar Trailblazer help us to learn and reduce the risk for future, low-cost small satellites to do innovative science as we prepare for a sustained human presence on the Moon. Thank you to the Lunar Trailblazer team for their dedication in working on and learning from this mission through to the end.”
The limited data the mission team had received from Lunar Trailblazer indicated that the spacecraft’s solar arrays were not properly oriented toward the Sun, which caused its batteries to become depleted.
For several months, collaborating organizations around the world — many of which volunteered their assistance — listened for the spacecraft’s radio signal and tracked its position. Ground radar and optical observations indicated that Lunar Trailblazer was in a slow spin as it headed farther into deep space.
“As Lunar Trailblazer drifted far beyond the Moon, our models showed that the solar panels might receive more sunlight, perhaps charging the spacecraft’s batteries to a point it could turn on its radio,” said Andrew Klesh, Lunar Trailblazer’s project systems engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “The global community’s support helped us better understand the spacecraft’s spin, pointing, and trajectory. In space exploration, collaboration is critical — this gave us the best chance to try to regain contact.”
However, as time passed, Lunar Trailblazer became too distant to recover as its telecommunications signals would have been too weak for the mission to receive telemetry and to command.
Technological Legacy
The small satellite’s High-resolution Volatiles and Minerals Moon Mapper (HVM3) imaging spectrometer was built by JPL to detect and map the locations of water and minerals. The mission’s Lunar Thermal Mapper (LTM) instrument was built by the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and funded by the UK Space Agency to gather temperature data and determine the composition of silicate rocks and soils to improve understanding of why water content varies over time.
“We’re immensely disappointed that our spacecraft didn’t get to the Moon, but the two science instruments we developed, like the teams we brought together, are world class,” said Bethany Ehlmann, the mission’s principal investigator at Caltech. “This collective knowledge and the technology developed will cross-pollinate to other projects as the planetary science community continues work to better understand the Moon’s water.”
Some of that technology will live on in the JPL-built Ultra Compact Imaging Spectrometer for the Moon (UCIS-Moon) instrument that NASA recently selected for a future orbital flight opportunity. The instrument, which has has an identical spectrometer design as HVM3, will provide the Moon’s highest spatial resolution data of surface lunar water and minerals.
More About Lunar Trailblazer
Lunar Trailblazer was selected by NASA’s SIMPLEx (Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration) competition, which provides opportunities for low-cost science spacecraft to ride-share with selected primary missions. To maintain the lower overall cost, SIMPLEx missions have a higher risk posture and less-stringent requirements for oversight and management. This higher risk acceptance bolsters NASA’s portfolio of targeted science missions designed to test pioneering mission approaches.
Caltech, which manages JPL for NASA, led Lunar Trailblazer’s science investigation, and Caltech’s IPAC led mission operations, which included planning, scheduling, and sequencing of all spacecraft activities. Along with managing Lunar Trailblazer, NASA JPL provided system engineering, mission assurance, the HVM3 instrument, and mission design and navigation. Lockheed Martin Space provided the spacecraft, integrated the flight system, and supported operations under contract with Caltech. The University of Oxford developed and provided the LTM instrument, funded by the UK Space Agency. Lunar Trailblazer, a project of NASA’s Lunar Discovery and Exploration Program, was managed by NASA’s Planetary Missions Program Office at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
